Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 1:01am
Faith vs. reason, Part 2
The spirit of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) lived on in Augustinian/Franciscan thinkers, but Abelard's (1079-1142) scholastic method utterly triumphed in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Was Bernard right about its "heresy"? John Courtney Murray described it as "methodological atheism."
Bernard's sermons on "The Song of Songs" are among the most celebrated writings in Christian spirituality. His meditations on the opening line refer to Jesus "on whom once and for all the Mouth of the Word was pressed, when the whole fullness of the divinity gave itself to him in the body (Colossians 2:9)."
Jesus is God's kiss of humankind, "this most sacred kiss, that is, the mystery of the incarnation of the Word." This kiss is no other than "the Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5)."
It's hard to overestimate a medieval giant of the stature of Bernard of Clairvaux. He was a correspondent with kings and popes, a major contributor to the solution of a papal schism (1130-1138) between two rival popes, a visionary leader of the Cistercian reform (founded in 1098), riveting preacher, spiritual director and leader eventually of a community of monasteries stretching from England to Germany and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. At Bernard's death there were more than 300 Cistercian monasteries.
St. Bernard devoted his energies as the pope's principal preacher to supporting the failed Second Crusade in 1136. He was also a spokesman for the Augustinian tradition of divine illumination of the human soul, in mystical prayer and in mystical reflection on Holy Scripture.
Abelard's use of the word "theology" had been mocked by Bernard as "stupid-ology," which is only comprehensible if we note that the word had never been popular in the Latin Fathers, who used the words "Sacred Doctrine." The word "theology" had indeed been used rarely by some Greek Fathers, but in the Latin West, it had even meant a study of the pagan gods. Abelard was the first to assert its commanding academic, and scandalously independent, presence.
Bernard would have none of it, especially when it contained the rationalist implications used by Abelard. The word "theo-logy," after all, can be reduced to logic about God, surely a violation of Christian piety, surely itself heresy in a nutshell.
Notice that reasoned "theology" can indeed lead to slippery ice, and that is John Courtney Murray's (1904-1967) point in his book "The Problem of God": Once you empower reason, intentionally emancipate analytic reason from "faith," such resultant rationalism can just as easily go its own way. Scientific method can turn on its religious emancipator and rationalize the faith out of existence. For Murray, this is exactly what happened when Eunomius (died about 393 CE) argued himself into a rationalist understanding of the knowledge of God. It is what "modernity" has done in its apparently inexorable march toward a completely atheist Western culture.
Bernard's opposition to Peter Abelard's apparent rationalism is not only a Christian issue, which it surely is and was, but we can also see it as the heart of present-day Islamic opposition to Western scientific method.
The outcome had been a close call, with much Christian Aristotelian philosophy condemned and excluded multiple times at the universities of Paris and Oxford. Given the emergence of "left-wing" Aristotelian theology in the universities, it was specifically condemned in various forms in 1277 after the death of Thomas in 1274, when both the archbishop of Paris and the archbishop of Canterbury had condemned many aspects of Aristotelian thought. The aging and saintly teacher of Thomas, Albert, called The Great in his lifetime, had to rise to Thomas' defense until his own death in 1280.
Can one be surprised that authorities within Islam describe such Western culture as "The Great Satan"?
I have noted in other columns Murray's trenchant phrase "methodological atheism." Murray uses this phrase in a nice conclusion of what was happening in medieval theology. It merits a significant quote:
"The first medieval event was the transposition of the problem of God into a problem for the philosophical intelligence. ... The second medieval event was the Thomist [sic: scholastic, obviously emphasized by Abelard] reception of Aristotle. Its effect, in regard of our present matter, was to introduce a view of the universe significantly different from the view fostered by the older Augustinian tradition, in which the universe was regarded chiefly as an arena in which man was to pursue his search for God, in his image and in his vestiges. The [Augustinian] universe was aliquid Dei, something of God; its value lay in this alone. In the new Thomist view, the universe was a subsistent order of being, radically distinct from God, endowed with its own proper autonomy. It was therefore to be explored and explained by intelligence in terms of philosophical principles of being, and the laws of rational thought [Abelard's central methodology]. ... He [Thomas Aquinas] transformed into systematic philosophical statement the biblical view of the world as an order or reality outside the order of the divine, revealing God indeed but not containing him. As it was itself a profane order, there was no profanation in searching out its secrets. ... Scholasticism in the Thomist style did indeed authorize a mode of rational inquiry, philosophical or scientific, that was methodologically atheist."
We should note that "methodological atheism" means that in one's practical mode of operation, one merely prescinds from, acts without conscious reference to, the reality of God.
My faith may hearten my carpentry, but my practice of carpentry is the same as an atheist's. So is my logic, thanks in large part to Abelard.
So is my astronomy, and so is my theory of evolution.
So also may be the literary-critical method applied to Holy Scripture, which was not fully accepted by Roman Catholicism until the 1964 declaration "On the Historical Truth of the Gospels" of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.
Will the literary-critical method ever be applied to the Qur'an? That method seems unwelcome at Brigham Young University when applied to the Book of Mormon. But it has been applied to Holy Scripture for a century or more within Protestantism and for decades within the Catholic Church.
What ever would St. Bernard think?
In 1961, Avery [now Cardinal] Dulles, S.J., had delivered a series of summer refresher lectures to Catholic priests. In his introduction, Dulles notes: "The Catholic apologist [defender of Catholic faith] is, quite evidently, a believer. ... But as an apologist, he has a particular function, namely to show the reasonableness of the assent of faith. This means that he cannot, in his work as an apologist, make use of all the helps which he enjoys as a believer. He has to rely on purely human evidence [This is exactly what Bernard objected to in Abelard]. ... Nor can he assume that the Bible is a divinely inspired source, free from error ... he is operating within the necessary limits of his discipline. He has to treat as questionable whatever he has not been able to establish by purely rational investigation. ... We do not have in the Bible, or even in the Gospels, fully scientific history."
In a nutshell, Bernard embodied the Augustinian tradition, while Abelard laid the foundations of the eventually triumphant scholastic Aristotelianism.
Bernard of Clairvaux won the battle against apparent heresy and rationalism in Abelard, but lost the war against scholastic Aristotelian Christianity to St. Thomas Aquinas.
By the time Thomas was canonized in 1323, the war was clearly over. Theology as lectio divina obviously maintained an important place in devotional Christianity, but heavyweight Aristotelian theology had won the day.
How dare traditionalist Catholics and Protestants find Islam too fundamentalist in Islam's interpretation of the Qur'an? That's exactly what the Christian fundamentalist does.
But much of mainline Christianity has indeed understood God to empower human reason, that it may "boldly go where it has never gone before," both into atheism and into Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, God's own Logos, Word of God.
Abelard would be proud.
— — —
Dr. George Gilmore, Ph.D., is professor of humanities at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. Send an email to {email ggilmore@shc.edu}ggilmore@shc.edu{/email}. © Copyright 2008 by George Gilmore.
Bernard's sermons on "The Song of Songs" are among the most celebrated writings in Christian spirituality. His meditations on the opening line refer to Jesus "on whom once and for all the Mouth of the Word was pressed, when the whole fullness of the divinity gave itself to him in the body (Colossians 2:9)."
Jesus is God's kiss of humankind, "this most sacred kiss, that is, the mystery of the incarnation of the Word." This kiss is no other than "the Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5)."
It's hard to overestimate a medieval giant of the stature of Bernard of Clairvaux. He was a correspondent with kings and popes, a major contributor to the solution of a papal schism (1130-1138) between two rival popes, a visionary leader of the Cistercian reform (founded in 1098), riveting preacher, spiritual director and leader eventually of a community of monasteries stretching from England to Germany and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. At Bernard's death there were more than 300 Cistercian monasteries.
St. Bernard devoted his energies as the pope's principal preacher to supporting the failed Second Crusade in 1136. He was also a spokesman for the Augustinian tradition of divine illumination of the human soul, in mystical prayer and in mystical reflection on Holy Scripture.
Abelard's use of the word "theology" had been mocked by Bernard as "stupid-ology," which is only comprehensible if we note that the word had never been popular in the Latin Fathers, who used the words "Sacred Doctrine." The word "theology" had indeed been used rarely by some Greek Fathers, but in the Latin West, it had even meant a study of the pagan gods. Abelard was the first to assert its commanding academic, and scandalously independent, presence.
Bernard would have none of it, especially when it contained the rationalist implications used by Abelard. The word "theo-logy," after all, can be reduced to logic about God, surely a violation of Christian piety, surely itself heresy in a nutshell.
Notice that reasoned "theology" can indeed lead to slippery ice, and that is John Courtney Murray's (1904-1967) point in his book "The Problem of God": Once you empower reason, intentionally emancipate analytic reason from "faith," such resultant rationalism can just as easily go its own way. Scientific method can turn on its religious emancipator and rationalize the faith out of existence. For Murray, this is exactly what happened when Eunomius (died about 393 CE) argued himself into a rationalist understanding of the knowledge of God. It is what "modernity" has done in its apparently inexorable march toward a completely atheist Western culture.
Bernard's opposition to Peter Abelard's apparent rationalism is not only a Christian issue, which it surely is and was, but we can also see it as the heart of present-day Islamic opposition to Western scientific method.
The outcome had been a close call, with much Christian Aristotelian philosophy condemned and excluded multiple times at the universities of Paris and Oxford. Given the emergence of "left-wing" Aristotelian theology in the universities, it was specifically condemned in various forms in 1277 after the death of Thomas in 1274, when both the archbishop of Paris and the archbishop of Canterbury had condemned many aspects of Aristotelian thought. The aging and saintly teacher of Thomas, Albert, called The Great in his lifetime, had to rise to Thomas' defense until his own death in 1280.
Can one be surprised that authorities within Islam describe such Western culture as "The Great Satan"?
I have noted in other columns Murray's trenchant phrase "methodological atheism." Murray uses this phrase in a nice conclusion of what was happening in medieval theology. It merits a significant quote:
"The first medieval event was the transposition of the problem of God into a problem for the philosophical intelligence. ... The second medieval event was the Thomist [sic: scholastic, obviously emphasized by Abelard] reception of Aristotle. Its effect, in regard of our present matter, was to introduce a view of the universe significantly different from the view fostered by the older Augustinian tradition, in which the universe was regarded chiefly as an arena in which man was to pursue his search for God, in his image and in his vestiges. The [Augustinian] universe was aliquid Dei, something of God; its value lay in this alone. In the new Thomist view, the universe was a subsistent order of being, radically distinct from God, endowed with its own proper autonomy. It was therefore to be explored and explained by intelligence in terms of philosophical principles of being, and the laws of rational thought [Abelard's central methodology]. ... He [Thomas Aquinas] transformed into systematic philosophical statement the biblical view of the world as an order or reality outside the order of the divine, revealing God indeed but not containing him. As it was itself a profane order, there was no profanation in searching out its secrets. ... Scholasticism in the Thomist style did indeed authorize a mode of rational inquiry, philosophical or scientific, that was methodologically atheist."
We should note that "methodological atheism" means that in one's practical mode of operation, one merely prescinds from, acts without conscious reference to, the reality of God.
My faith may hearten my carpentry, but my practice of carpentry is the same as an atheist's. So is my logic, thanks in large part to Abelard.
So is my astronomy, and so is my theory of evolution.
So also may be the literary-critical method applied to Holy Scripture, which was not fully accepted by Roman Catholicism until the 1964 declaration "On the Historical Truth of the Gospels" of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.
Will the literary-critical method ever be applied to the Qur'an? That method seems unwelcome at Brigham Young University when applied to the Book of Mormon. But it has been applied to Holy Scripture for a century or more within Protestantism and for decades within the Catholic Church.
What ever would St. Bernard think?
In 1961, Avery [now Cardinal] Dulles, S.J., had delivered a series of summer refresher lectures to Catholic priests. In his introduction, Dulles notes: "The Catholic apologist [defender of Catholic faith] is, quite evidently, a believer. ... But as an apologist, he has a particular function, namely to show the reasonableness of the assent of faith. This means that he cannot, in his work as an apologist, make use of all the helps which he enjoys as a believer. He has to rely on purely human evidence [This is exactly what Bernard objected to in Abelard]. ... Nor can he assume that the Bible is a divinely inspired source, free from error ... he is operating within the necessary limits of his discipline. He has to treat as questionable whatever he has not been able to establish by purely rational investigation. ... We do not have in the Bible, or even in the Gospels, fully scientific history."
In a nutshell, Bernard embodied the Augustinian tradition, while Abelard laid the foundations of the eventually triumphant scholastic Aristotelianism.
Bernard of Clairvaux won the battle against apparent heresy and rationalism in Abelard, but lost the war against scholastic Aristotelian Christianity to St. Thomas Aquinas.
By the time Thomas was canonized in 1323, the war was clearly over. Theology as lectio divina obviously maintained an important place in devotional Christianity, but heavyweight Aristotelian theology had won the day.
How dare traditionalist Catholics and Protestants find Islam too fundamentalist in Islam's interpretation of the Qur'an? That's exactly what the Christian fundamentalist does.
But much of mainline Christianity has indeed understood God to empower human reason, that it may "boldly go where it has never gone before," both into atheism and into Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, God's own Logos, Word of God.
Abelard would be proud.
— — —
Dr. George Gilmore, Ph.D., is professor of humanities at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. Send an email to {email ggilmore@shc.edu}ggilmore@shc.edu{/email}. © Copyright 2008 by George Gilmore.